Losing Hope: The Plight of Black Migrants in Morocco
Morocco appears to be the exception in a region plagued by unrest, but for Sub-Saharan migrants it may be just one more stop on a grueling and dangerous journey.
By Max Levy
She was found dead in the afternoon.
Her name was Hope Lindone Ondekane Inkale — a 2 year old from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who had come to Morocco a few months earlier with nearly a dozen members of her family. They’re refugees all, fleeing violence and unrest in their home country.
Her mother, Linda, narrates this part of the story.
They woke up late that day. Work was and still is very scarce, in a country where 10 percent of the population and 20 percent of young people are unemployed, according to a 2015 World Bank estimate. They ate breakfast, and Hope was bathed with the rest of the children, a daily ritual from their native Congo, performed here still, thousands of miles away. Afterwards, her older sister took the children to church, while the adults washed the floor of their two-bedroom apartment. It’s tiled, the floor, and voices ring through the hallways.
The children returned and were sent outside to play. The next part of the story is constructed from the testimony of the young children, Linda says.
The children went up to the third floor of their building. Hope was with them. At some point, the children say, a Moroccan woman came out of her apartment and started screaming at them.
The woman is about 40 years old and unemployed. She had warned the family in the past about Hope touching her husband’s pushcart — he’s a street vendor. She, and also possibly her husband, had said the family needed to keep a closer eye on Hope.
Because neither of them have yet been charged with a crime, I’m omitting their names.
The children tried to get away when the woman ran towards them, but Hope wasn’t fast enough, and the woman grabbed her. The last child down said they saw the woman had grabbed Hope, and that Hope was crying.
But they did not dwell on this, and soon forgot about it. They were just kids, after all.
Time passes.
A boy, Hope’s brother, was sent to buy food for the family. He is 5 years old.
On the way back, outside of their house, he saw the same woman, laying his sister on the ground next to their door.
Clamor of children, though the body did not move. Hope’s body — at first it looked like she was sleeping, so the children tried to wake her, shouting, “Hope, wake up! Wake up!”
Some grabbed her to shake her awake.
She was lying in a pool of blood, and there was blood on her head where she had been stabbed twice.
The children ran inside, crying out.
Hope was dead.
W e are riding seven-deep in a Mercedes sedan, some 30 minutes outside of Rabat. My fixer and fellow journalist, Franck Nama is riding shotgun, and my contact from the Association for the Congolese Diaspora in Morocco sits to my immediate right. Three strangers complete the retinue, on this crushed and sweaty journey, through the scrublands, towards Tamesna.
Since its conception in 2004, Tamesna has helped to relieve a growing housing shortage in the capital. We change cars halfway, and reach the city at around 2 o’clock. Grim apartment buildings surround a square where colorful litter blows and a handful of mules stand tied to metal poles. Laundry flaps in windows, and the sky is nacred with clouds. For the most part, the streets are quiet.
We walk the rest of the way to an apartment building on the outskirts of town, where 11 members of Hope’s family live together. One of Hope’s brothers invites us into their living room, which is tidy and spotless. An open window permits the sounds of traffic.
We sit on couches and stacked plastic garden chairs. The brother looks dour and says he’s in a bad mood. He won’t say why.
After a minute, Linda enters, along with a handful of others, and we start to talk about Hope.
Hope was born in Kinshasa, on Oct. 16, 2013. She was a light in their community, Linda says, and had already made friends with most of the people in the building.
“She couldn’t yet speak very well, so she was calling me ‘Mama Linda,’” she says. “She was giving everyone nicknames.”
I ask about the day of the murder, and Linda says nothing at first. She looks into the middle distance. After a moment, she begins:
“It’s very hard for me to talk about,” she says. “In fact, every time I try to talk about it, I immediately see the image of Hope, lying on the ground.”
Disheartened, disenfranchised and increasingly disaffected, Morocco’s Sub-Saharan migrants tell stories of abuse and rejection — of the corrupt institutions that are unable and unwilling to protect them, and of the racism that they face every day as black Africans living in Morocco.
They say that gangs of teenagers follow them through the streets, insulting them and pelting them with stones. When they go to the police, they are turned away. Lawsuits brought by them often fail, and, when they do manage to secure convictions for crimes such as assault and murder, sentences are very light. They complain of cases being buried and crucial evidence tampered with. When they get sick, even if they are close to death, Moroccan hospitals refuse to treat them, or treat them insufficiently. When they try to protest their living conditions, they are denied permits, and those who protest anyway are driven away by police.
It’s difficult to estimate the number of Sub-Saharan migrants who currently reside in Morocco, a North African kingdom home to some 34 million people. Most are documented, though many are not. In 2013, the Ministry of the Interior put the total number of irregular migrants between 25,000 and 40,000, while Rashid Badouli, director of the Orient-Occident Foundation, puts the number of Syrian and Sub-Saharan migrants currently living in Morocco between 20,000 and 35,000.
Some, including Hope’s family, are refugees. 4,500 refugees and asylum-seekers were living in Morocco in 2015, according to the UNHCR.
In 2014, King Mohammed VI regularized the status of some 18,000 migrants — mostly Senegalese, Nigerians and Ivoirians — who met certain criteria, including having lived in Morocco for several years or being able to prove family ties to Moroccan nationals. A new regularization campaign is planned for the coming months.
Still, the plight of black migrants living in and transiting through Morocco continues.
I began researching this story soon after Hope was killed on Oct. 3. I found a community caught between indignation and fear — between grief and a deep mistrust of authority, the optimism that first brought them to Morocco fast disappearing.
Franck is a black African, originally from Cameroon, who has lived in Morocco for the past several years. Franck is also an activist. When he tries to organize demonstrations, other migrants ask if he’s crazy. They ask if he’s trying to get himself killed.
He is hardly laudatory about the living conditions of Sub-Saharans in Morocco.
“If migrants give you their heart, they will tell you that they do not want to stay here,” he says.
Franck and I get to know each other well over the course of this story. In the Bantu culture of his home village, Franck says, having children is seen as the ultimate goal of a person’s life. I imagine that this makes Hope’s death all the more odious to him. Franck has a wife and young daughter of his own in Morocco.
Antonie Dzomatio, 29, was a friend of Franck’s. In the tight-knit community of Cameroonian immigrants, Franck called Antonie his brother. Antonie was stabbed outside of a nightclub in Rabat, and failed to receive proper care for his wounds, leading to his drawn-out death in an area hospital.
Franck is willing to put me in touch with Antonie’s girlfriend, Nadine, and his younger brother, Stephan. The next day, I meet them at Antonie’s apartment, in the Shaid neighborhood of Rabat.
Nadine is dressed in blue, and the walls of the room are blue. Stephan is there as well, lying on a bed that has been pushed to one side. The room is separated from the rest of the apartment by a curtain of thin brown cloth.
Nadine sighs and begins.
“Antonie was always a kind man,” Nadine says. “His door was always open. He was the hope of his family.”
She recalls his patience, his goodness. About a month and a half ago, the two were walking around Rabat when a gang of Moroccans attacked them, harassing Nadine and shouting that they “wanted a black girl.” Antonie spoke to the group, begging the Moroccans not to stab them. After a while, she says, they were left alone.
Since Antonie’s death, the landlord has been threatening to evict Stephan. Antonie supported several family members financially, including his ailing mother in Cameroon. He lived legally in Morocco, and worked in information technology.
On the night of Sep. 22, Antonie was stabbed outside of Harold’s Nightclub in Rabat. According to his brothers, he had gone to get some air and begun talking to a woman, when he was confronted by a Moroccan man. An argument followed, and the man pulled a knife on Antonie, stabbing him. Stephan says police took a knife as evidence, and that it has since disappeared.
Although he was badly wounded, suffering lacerations to his stomach and kidneys, Antonie did not succumb to his injuries right away. Instead, Nadine and Stephan say, he was subjected to multiple rounds of insufficient medical treatment, which led to his dying slowly and terribly over the next two weeks.
Antonie was taken first to the Souissi Clinic, where he had to be resuscitated twice and received echographs of his torso, according to hospital records. The hospital did not close his gaping wounds, however, through which his stomach could be seen.
He was released the following day. The total cost of his stay was nearly 19,000 DH, which Antonie paid himself.
From there, Antonie’s condition worsened. Nadine points to a spot on the bed next to Stephan and says that Antonie had sat there the following day, a Saturday, clutching the gash in his stomach, complaining about feeling sick. At one point, fecal matter began leaking out of the wound, which had to be cleaned.
Two days later, they were forced to go to a second, public hospital. Doctors told the family that Antonie needed an operation to fix the hole in his stomach and remove one of his kidneys. Out of options, the family agreed to the surgery.
They never spoke to Antonie again. After the first operation, he was placed in a medically-induced coma.
What happened next is unclear. The Ibn Sina Hospital Center refuses to release the records of Antonie’s stay, but told the family that he needed additional surgery to fix his other kidney and siphon blood from his abdomen.
After the first surgery, Stephan and Nadine say, the family wasn’t allowed to see Antonie. Doctors told the family that Antonie was all right, and that he was recovering. They said this over and over again, but the family didn’t know what was actually happening.
They were only allowed to visit Antonie once during his stay at Ibn Sina. Stephan was there.
Even standing in Antonie’s room, Stephan says he couldn’t tell whether his brother was alive or not. He was covered in blood.
On Oct. 8, Ibn Sina gave Antonie’s body to his family.
Nadine shows me a picture of the corpse. Antonie’s face is swollen and unwashed, and the left side of his forehead is bloody. His entire body was bloody, Stephan says. This was the condition in which the hospital returned his brother to them.
“Maybe there was a chance to save Antonie,” Stephan says. “But that first clinic, because we are black, they just treated us like animals.”
The family doesn’t have enough money to send Antonie’s body back to Cameroon, but is adamant that he not be buried here.
“I have lost the will to be in Morocco,” Nadine says. “I want to go home. Antonie was a very good man. If they can kill him, they can kill anybody.”
It’s Oct. 13, the day of the press conference. Myself and many others are gathered in the lobby of the African Cultural Center, which is packed full of men and women in formal dress. Stephan, from the Association for the Congolese Diaspora in Morocco, leads me to a seat in the second row, behind Linda and her family. There are a handful of European reporters and other media folks from immigration nonprofits, but almost no Moroccans as far as I can see.
A few steps in front of the audience is a table behind which sit Franck; Jules Malewa, the president of the ACDM; Rashid Badouli, representing the Orient-Occident Foundation; and Elkbir Lemseguem, the UNHCR lawyer appointed to Hope’s case.
The conference is in French, so I have to get a recording translated after the fact (the descriptions here are a synthesis of my notes and the after-the-fact translation).
The faces of the assembly are fixed on Malewa, who introduces the lawyer and announces the formation of the Hope Support Committee — an association of nonprofits and community leaders dedicated to prosecuting this and similar murders.
“We have decided to create this committee, not only for this case, but for all of the cases to come,” he says. “And we have asked the lawyer to come and try to give the correct information about the case of Hope.”
Lemseguem summarizes the results of the police investigation so far. When they arrived on the scene, police found a pool of blood where Hope’s body had lain. The husband of the woman admitted investigators into their home, where they found an apparently bloody mop and headscarf. The headscarf had been stuffed inside of a washing machine.
Investigators were unable to locate a murder weapon. An official autopsy identified the cause of death as two deep wounds in back of Hope’s head. No other signs of violence were found on the body.
The woman claims that she was inside of her kitchen at the time of Hope’s death, and was alerted to the fact by shouting and commotion outside.
She says the red fluid on her clothes was paint. Some of the items in the apartment were taken as evidence, and the results of a laboratory test are pending.
Blood was also found smeared in the halls and stairways, as well as on the roofs of adjacent buildings, which could indicate that Hope’s body was moved in an effort by the woman to cover her tracks.
Police found bruises on the woman’s body that could have come from climbing over the barriers between the roofs of the buildings, while the woman would have been carrying Hope.
A witness who was present in the woman’s house could not account for a 30-minute period when the woman said that she was in the kitchen. Later, Lemseguen told me that the woman’s aunt and children had been in the apartment at the same time.
Lemseguem mentions some of the concerns he already has with the investigation. He suspects that the government trying to handle the case in such a way that it’s kept out of criminal court.
The woman will be charged on Nov. 2. If convicted of murder, she faces life in prison.
“The people have the right to know how she killed Hope,” Lemseguem says.
He adds that, once the laboratory test is complete, it will be much harder for her to claim a lack of involvement in Hope’s death.
After Lemseguem, Franck introduces Rashid — a slim Moroccan with bright eyes and a black hair tied back in a ponytail.
He emphasizes the need for persistent advocacy against racism that will continue even after Hope’s case, and says the death of Hope should be a rallying cry for Moroccans and Sub-Saharan Africans alike.
“For me, this is a battle of humanity. This is everyone’s fight, and nobody has the right to make this his own battle,” he says.
The room is opened for questions. One man from FASED, a Casablanca-based immigration nonprofit, asks who police think the last person was to see Hope alive (it was one of the children), before expressing his own thoughts about the death of Hope, which he calls an “assassination.”
“There are no big murders or small murders,” he says. “Why is it that we are in this country, and they say publicly we are welcome, but in fact they don’t want to see us here?”
He gets louder as he continues, articulating each syllable in the word ass-ass-inats. The group mutters its approval.
“This needs to stop! The assassinations need to stop!”
People shout and applaud.
“This is why we are going to march!”
On Oct. 27, the Hope Support Committee will spearhead a march on the Palace of Parliament in Rabat. I have my doubts about their ability to do this — more specifically, I doubt the Ministry of the Interior will let them to do this. There is undoubtedly passion and anger in this room, but freedom of assembly is regulated by the government, and I’m told that protest permits are very difficult to come by for migrant groups.
Although he raises the possibility that the case may be tampered with, Lemseguem will not say that he lacks confidence in the Moroccan justice system.
Several people criticize Lemseguem and the UNHCR openly, and ask whether he’s qualified to handle the case alone.
“When the time comes that you are under pressure, you may not defend Hope correctly,” a man suggests.
“I’ve been working on these cases for 12 years, and this would not be the first time I’ve faced pressure from somebody.”
“But this is different: this time we have a murder!”
Crosstalk. A woman claiming to be a human rights worker and refugee says she hasn’t seen Lemseguem deliver victory to any of the migrants he’s represented in the past.
“I know you well, and you know me. Are you sure that you are going to follow this case and defend Hope normally?”
Lemseguem takes so much flak that Jules feels compelled to step in and apologize to him on behalf of the community.
“I don’t have your cases with me here to know exactly what they are. If you think that I’m not competent, take money from your own pockets and go and find another lawyer,” Lemseguem says testily. “You have the right to find another lawyer.”
One of the last people to speak is a M. Sempou from ADESGUIM, which represents the Guinean diaspora in Morocco. He echoes something Franck had said earlier: that silence in the face of racism is complicity.
He brings up the Moroccan diaspora and the millions of Moroccans who currently live abroad.
The implication is that Moroccans should treat migrants how they would like their countrymen treated, in difficult migratory situations of their own. Franck says that, although not all Moroccans are racist, it only takes one to cause a tragedy.
The Souissi Clinic is a quiet, modular structure, with a garden in the back and signs admonishing “SILENCE” around its perimeter.
In the interest of discretion and to maximize our chances of actually talking with someone, Franck and I don’t call the clinic ahead of time, although we do announce our status as journalists once we arrive.
I expect to be escorted out of the place, but eventually we’re admitted into the office of administrator Youssef Elilam, who says he’s willing to talk with us about the treatment Antonie received at the facility.
He pulls a file off his desk and reads from a report prepared by the clinic (I was able to get the records of Antonie’s stay at the Souissi Clinic from another source, but the clinic itself refused to give me a hard copy of this final report, due to patient privacy regulations).
According to the report, Antonie drove himself to the hospital, and was conscious when he first arrived, which his family disputes. The report says he was aware and communicative when he came to the emergency ward, presenting with stab wounds in his chest and back, and his breathing and heartbeat were normal.
Youssef says that the wounds were 3 and 4 centimeters each. It’s not clear to me whether he’s referring to the length or depth of the wounds. He says the original cost of the stay was 25,000 DH, but they reduced it when they realized his financial predicament.
In Youssef’s opinion, Antonie required additional treatment, but, as a private institution, they couldn’t just treat him without compensation. He is careful to add that clinic disclosed the cost of treatment up front and that Antonie left of his own volition.
“The patient needed more, at least four days in intensive care and three or four days in a medical room,” he says.
Because Youssef did not treat Antonie personally, he can’t comment on the state of Antonie’s wounds when he left the Souissi Clinic.
The whole interview lasts about half an hour. As Franck and I step outside, I realize that the visit has left me with more questions than answers.
We walk towards the main road to get a taxi. When I ask Franck what he thought of the meeting, he says that he thinks we’re being followed, and that someone is anticipating our next moves.
Antonie came to the clinic several weeks ago, he explains, but they still had the documents ready for us as soon as we arrived. We didn’t even call to let them know we were coming.
Franck thinks that because of the pressure being put on Ibn Sina to hand over the records of Antonie’s stay, the two hospitals could now be working together to prevent the release of harmful information.
Franck gestures towards a group of children playing tag outside of the clinic.
“Look at this. There are children playing and they are killing people in there!”
I arrive outside of parliament at around 11:30 in the morning, halfway through the time slotted for the protest. It’s hot — nearly 90 degrees in the sun, and there’s very little shade.
Franck and the others are nowhere to be found.
Gendarmes are everywhere, along with members of the armed forces, submachine gun-toting antiterrorism police and plainclothes officers.
I walk back towards the train station and try to call Franck.
When I get through, he explains that the police turned them away because they hadn’t gotten official authorization from the Ministry of the Interior to protest.
We meet a few blocks from parliament, next to the tram tracks. Franck says that the demonstrators had been scattered by police after multiple attempts made at entering the square.
A conversation with two of the officers present, during which I am photographed and filmed by several people — some of whom, I am later told, were likely members of the so-called “secret police” — confirms this.
Eventually, those protestors still hanging around leave. Some go to the African Cultural Center, where the prevailing mood is very tense.
In Franck’s office, which he shares with his editor, Mohamed Mboyo, a would-be protestor shows me the signs they had made.
Que justice soit rendue áchaque muerte de migrants, one of the signs reads. “Justice will be served for the death of every migrant.”
Franck alternately paces and sits on his desk, rubbing his leg. Mohamed works at his computer in silence.
More bad news comes later, when I learn that Linda failed to show up at the courthouse at the correct time, which means the charges against the woman won’t be read for another month.
The results of the blood test, which may or may not be in, are also sealed.
Franck is chewing on a nail. After we left parliament, he had to call off a bus of protestors that was about to depart for Rabat.
He says that another march is already being planned for the coming weeks.
I ask whether he thinks another protest is even possible, since they’ve already been denied a permit once.
“We are going to do it, whether they like it or not,” he replies.
“We are going to fight, if we have to!”
Rashid is the director of the Orient-Occident Foundation, a Rabat-based nonprofit that helps migrants find employment and integrate into local communities. Their headquarters is a spaceship-like building in the neighborhood of El Manal, next to a public park and a squat, concrete police station, veined with grime.
In October, the foundation’s 10th annual Rabat Africa Festival was postponed, following international media coverage of Hope’s death. Orient-Occident failed to renew official paperwork for the festival, Rashid says, but he also believes that the foundation’s goal of organizing migrants makes them a target for government harassment.
I meet with him in the foundation’s library to figure out why racism against black people is so volatile in Morocco.
Rashid tells me to imagine a man beating his wife, who goes on to beat their child. That child will grow up to abuse people who he sees as inferior.
In the same way, Moroccans are acting out their frustration with widespread unemployment and corruption on migrants. 48 percent of Moroccans who participated in a 2016 Transparency International survey said they had bribed an official at some point during the past year.
“The child who sees migrants as lesser than him will go on to beat migrants,” Rashid says. “Socially, there is persecution everywhere, and migrants are the last step in the persecution.”
Ironically, many of the complaints that migrants have about Moroccan institutions are echoed by Moroccans themselves. But that doesn’t answer the question of why black Africans are seen as inferior to begin with.
Rashid ties it to a sociological “fear of the other,” and many of the things that he says Moroccans say about black migrants — that they drive down wages, that they import crime — could just as easily have been said of any immigrant in any country.
Maybe a more solid answer can be found by looking at the historical status of black people in Morocco, which has led to Morocco’s failure to self-identify as an African nation.
Dr. Chouki El Hamel is a professor at Arizona State University whose studies focus on the history and impact of slavery in Morocco. His monograph on the subject, “Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race and Islam,” was released through Cambridge University Press in 2013.
The Imazighen people, popularly known as Berbers, have lived in Morocco for millenia. After being forced south by Roman invaders, the technologically superior Imazighen subjugated the black peoples of the Sahara and installed themselves as a racial and cultural upper class, El Hamel says.
Black Saharans were forced into servitude, vassalage and intermarriage under Imazighen rule. When the Arab Umayyad caliphate finished conquering North Africa in 700 C.E., they brought along their own prejudices against black Africans. The Arabs would later oversee the rise of the slave trade and the en masse transport of human beings to be sold in Moroccan slave markets.
Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif became sultan of Morocco in 1672. El Hamel pegs his rule as a turning point when ideas of blackness and slavery became fused together in the Moroccan cultural consciousness.
Moulay Ismail conscripted both free and enslaved blacks into his personal army, which came to be known as the “Black Army.” At its peak, the group included between 100,000 and 200,000 soldiers. Many or most were inducted into the royal order by force.
The wounds of slavery continue to haunt the lives of black Moroccans, even today. Less than a decade ago, the kingdom’s southern neighbor, Mauritania, became the last country in the world to criminalize slavery. Morocco itself abolished slavery in 1922.
Among the insults directed towards black people in Morocco, terms like raqiq (‘slave’) and azzi (‘n----r’), the phrase al-Afaraqa, meaning ‘Africans,’ is used to refer to black Africans as a group.
Arabs and Imazighen make up 99 percent of the population, according to an estimate by the CIA World Factbook. A number of online sources also refer to a “sizable” minority of black or mixed-race Haratin and Gnawa, but the size and extent to which these ethnic groups overlap is unclear.
In 1984, Morocco left the Organisation of African Unity after the group recognized the Polisario Front’s claim to Western Sahara. King Mohammed VI applied to rejoin the African Union just three months ago.
In a statement released to the BBC, Mohamed Salek Ould Salek, Foreign Minister of the Polisario Front, said the rebel group opposes Morocco’s AU bid.
“The aim and essence of the Union is the liberation of Africa,” he said. “Morocco [has] become a colonizer.”
Rashid doesn’t think the flow of Sub-Saharan migrants into Morocco will stop any time soon. Central Africa is drying up, literally — desertification linked to climate change and overpopulation is worsening socioeconomic problems, as farmers lose their livelihoods and water becomes more difficult to find. The United Nations estimates that water scarcity in arid and semiarid lands could displace up to 700 million people by 2030.
Meanwhile, Morocco’s eastern neighbor, Algeria, is ramping up expulsions of its own migrant population, with thousands of Sub-Saharans being forcibly sent back to their countries of origin each month, according to Human Rights Watch.
Rashid also doubts the status of Sub-Saharan migrants has improved since many of them were regularized under King Mohammed VI. I heard mixed opinions about this — whether the condition of migrants has improved since 2014. The government recently announced a second regularization program for the coming year.
Rashid says the fight to integrate Sub-Saharan migrants into Moroccan society is ongoing.
“[A migrant] can have a residence card, but the situation hasn’t changed,” he says.
Some weeks after our first conversation, Linda, Franck and I meet at a coffee shop to discuss developments in the story. Linda is cagey and desperate. She says things are only getting worse for her family. They can’t leave the house anymore, except in groups.
The community has been growing more and more hostile to their case, she says, and gives an example:
Her neighbor is a taxi driver. One day, Linda and migrant another woman happened to get in his cab. When the women began talking, the driver told them to shut up. He slammed on the brakes and said they needed to get out. He barely waited for Linda to step out of the car before speeding away.
The family of the suspect has told them they’ll be thrown out in the event of a conviction. Linda is almost shouting all of this, pausing every few sentences to stare at the ground.
She wants the UNHCR to find them another place to live. Or maybe just her — some members of the family want the whole thing to be over, and are critical of Linda’s choice to pursue the case.
She shakes her head.
“I can’t stay here anymore,” she says.
Pretty early on, I realized that I couldn’t write this story without incorporating at least some of my own experience covering it.
This story is not about the challenges I faced while reporting on a subject whose scope and complexity totally outstripped my abilities — me, a third-year journalism student, working freelance with no supervision to speak of. In fact, the amount of fear and sadness that was shared with me makes me embarrassed to talk about how I suffered, or how I was adversely affected by some of the things that I heard and saw. But regardless, I did become emotionally invested in the cases of Antonie and Hope.
I feel like I need to explain myself a bit, so you can understand my state of mind while writing this story and maybe take this digression as a grain of salt, or as an elaboration on things that I can’t fully describe in the third-person.
I’ll try to keep it short.
I had a realization one day, after trying and failing to verify some detail about Antonie’s stay in the first clinic. I think it was after Franck and I went to the clinic, and Youssef read us the report that contradicted the story of Antonie’s family. I had been getting increasingly frustrated — with the language barrier, with the lack of publicly available records and even with feuding and disorganization within the migrant community itself.
I realized that all of the things that had been making my job difficult, including the lack of government cooperation, were the same things stopping black migrants from fighting the injustice that is regularly perpetrated against them. Except migrants have to prove their cases in the courts of those same government officials, where the burden of proof is tremendous.
While writing Hope’s story, the question I was asked, over and over again, was why did this happen? If Hope’s death was indeed the result of foul play, what could have compelled someone to do this — especially in such a brutal, violent way?
The truth is that I don’t know. If the woman did, indeed, take Hope against her will and stab her to death, I guess the answer is in her heart alone, inscrutable and secret.
She has asserted her innocence thus far, and I’m not a judge, or a jury, or a jailer. I can only repeat what I know. She says that she was in her kitchen at the time, and got her bruises from an incident in a public bath, and that’s the end of it.
Was it a racist crime? The migrant community certainly thinks so. It’s hard for me to imagine that any single person would murder a 2-year-old child based solely on the color of their skin, or their migrant status. It’s also hard for me to imagine what could motivate anyone to murder a 2-year-old child.
In a conversation with Lemseguem, he said that he is trying to prove premeditation on the grounds of what the woman and/or her husband said to Hope’s family in the past, about Hope touching the husband’s cart. If convicted of aggravated murder, the woman could be sentenced to death (granted, the death penalty had been suspended in Morocco since 1993, and Lemseguem is unsure if he wants to pursue capital punishment).
Maybe Hope did invoke the ire of the woman’s family, in a way that seems ridiculously petty to me. Maybe, if Hope was Moroccan, she wouldn’t have had to pay for that with her life. Lemseguem said violence is often meted out against migrants with “total impunity.”
Or maybe Hope was killed simply because for being black, in the wrong country, at the wrong time.
In Antonie’s case, almost everything was in the fog — he was stabbed, and died in the hospital, and very probably could have been saved, and his killer walks free, and the Moroccan government doesn’t seem to care.
On Dec. 2, Franck says he was called into the Ministry of the Interior, which questioned him for an hour about his involvement in the Hope case, and asked whether he was an enemy of the state. He said that he was just trying to do the right thing, and that he didn’t understand why the government would try to obstruct his work.
When I ask if he’s worried about what will happen to him once I leave and the story is released, he says he is not.
“We have to keep fighting, no matter what,” he said. “When you are doing the right thing, you don’t have to tremble, or feel scared.”
In November, I took a break for about four weeks — to parse through my notes and try to mellow the general psychic strain that had crept into the rest of my life. I had a privilege of distance that Linda and Stephan and Franck did not. My break from interviewing worked, sort of, and I wrote most of this story before December.
Of course, all of us are privileged in a way that Antonie and Hope are not, in that we are still able to tell our stories and the stories of others.
More than anything, I worry that the families of Antonie and Hope will be cheated out of their day in court, or endangered as a result of attention brought by this story.
Linda and Stephan and Franck all said that they’re willing to take that risk.
I t is almost two in the afternoon, Dec. 5, when I call Franck from a balcony overlooking the Avenue de France in Agdal.
For the past week, most of Morocco has been rained out, including Rabat. The internet in my apartment stopped working days ago, so I’m forced to travel between cafés if I want to get any work done.
At least for now, the rain seems to have stopped.
Franck picks up his phone after my second try.
“Hello, Franck? How are you?”
“Fine, how are you?”
“I’m fine. Are you still at the courthouse?”
“Yes, in fact we are just getting out right now.”
Even through the single speaker of my burner phone, he sounds ecstatic.
“So, what happened? Are they going to charge her?”
“Yes, yes, they charged her.”
“With what, Franck?”
“With murder.”
Or at least that’s what it looks like will happen, as Franck clarifies later that evening.
I run into him at the center, just as he’s getting ready to leave. Due to a miscommunication, the charges will be formally read on the 27th. Still, he and Mohamed Mboyo say the judge seems sympathetic to their case.
They even say that Lemseguem is stepping up to the pressure of the proceedings, at least some of which, they speculate, has come from the UNHCR itself.
I very much hope that their optimism is justified, and that Linda will get her day in court.
The outcome of Antonie’s case is far less certain.
Franck says Antonie’s family is still raising money to return his body to Cameroon, but apart from that he has no idea what’s going on. No one wants to talk about it, he says. He doesn’t even know if the case is still open.
Last I heard, after Antonie died, the man who allegedly stabbed him was being brought back to court. The woman detained in connection with Hope’s case is currently being held in jail.
I tried multiple times to get an official account of Antonie’s attack from police, as well as the Ibn Sina records and other information from credible authorities, but so far I’ve come up empty-handed.
The Cameroonian community, meanwhile, has started pressuring individuals not to cooperate with journalists and nonprofits. Their caution is understandable, but I worry that infighting and factionalism could undermine efforts to get justice for Antonie.
An official with the Cameroonian government confirmed that they are following the case.
For now, as far as I know, the bodies of Antonie and Hope lie in a Rabat mortuary, unburied, waiting.
If Hope’s death is especially tragic because of its brutality, Antonie’s is tragic because it seems so absurd. Hope was killed by a person, but Antonie was killed by a system.
The details of both cases are shrouded in uncertainty — a veil that the system, it seems, is not eager to help lift.
For better or worse, the story is only half-over.
I will continue to provide updates as it develops.
This article has been expanded to include recent developments, and a correction has been made.
In the original story, the results of a blood test on items belonging to the suspect in Hope’s case were confused with the results of a second set of tests. The story has since been edited to reflect this information.
UPDATE #1:
Mar. 20, 2017
Two and a half months later, Hope’s case has been progressing slowly, but measurably. The status of Antonie’s case remains unknown — it may already be lost.
Fatiha Redouane (whom I referred to as “the woman” in the original story) has been charged in the death of Hope. The official charge, violence volontaire ayant entraîné la mort d’un enfant sans l’intention de la donner, falls short of murder but carries a prison sentence of 10 to 15 years.
A bit of background on Fatiha. She was born in 1977. She has two children. According to Hope’s lawyer, Elkbir Lemseguem, she never received a formal education and has never been convicted of a crime.
At a hearing on Mar. 9, a 4-year-old boy was asked to identify Fatiha as Hope’s kidnapper. He’d been with Hope on the day she was killed.
Local journalist Franck Nama says the questioning that followed was painful to watch, and that the number of people in the courtroom put an undue amount of pressure on the boy.
The child was difficult to understand due to his age, Lemseguem adds, and very emotional. He was ultimately unable to identify Fatiha.
In an unsworn statement at an earlier hearing, another young girl who had been with Hope positively identified Fatiha as the killer.
The results of multiple blood tests have since been released. One set of tests identified traces of human blood on the terrace and stairs of Hope and Fatiha’s apartment building. Other tests failed to find blood on a mop and headscarf taken from Fatiha’s apartment.
On Jan. 13, three months after her death, Hope was buried, and a funeral held by her family.
Franck says that Hope’s mother, Linda, is getting more and more worn down by the judicial process, and keeps showing up late for court appointments. She’s still living in Tamesna, where the killing occurred.
“The judicial machine is working to free [Fatiha],” Franck says.
As for Antonie’s case, very little has changed. Franck still doesn’t know what’s going on. I’ve tried to get more supporting documents, which is complicated by the fact that I’m now working from the United States. No dice, so far.
Last December, the Moroccan government announced the second stage of its regularization campaign. According to HuffPost Maroc, on Feb. 12, a Moroccan official confirmed that 16,000 migrants had since applied for regularized status.
